I open my mouth to answer but he silences me before I start. “You’d be like Christa. Risking your survival for a few moments of…”
“A few moments of real,” I spit back. “A few moments of being touched without worrying about what the group thinks.”
His eyes narrow and I can tell his mind is at war with what he should say and what he wants to say. In the end he leans his head back against his bag and stares up through the canopy of trees.
An impossibly blue sky peeks between the heavy branches and for what must be the millionth time I consider the irony that we are stuck in a place that people want to escape to. There are worse places we could have crashed than a rainforest. We don’t have harsh winters and though our summers are humid and sometimes exhausting, we are never too far from water.
We’re trapped in paradise, and with Cade’s chest rising and falling, a thin sheen of sweat calling attention to every contour and ripple, I feel more and more like half of the trap is just ourselves setting barriers we are afraid to cross.
Six
Ahead of me, Cade forges on, his heels digging into the steep incline as we gain elevation and stray further from our main source of water. It’s not difficult to find water in a rainforest, but leaving the stream has me anxious. Without the consistency of the creek to follow we run the risk of losing our way. If we find civilization and then can’t find our way back to Tanner and Christa what have we gained?
It feels like we have been walking for years when it has only been a few days. It’s the absence of the group that makes the silence deafening. For years we’ve lived with the sounds of others moving in the background, and now there is only the wind in the trees and the soft squish of the damp earth beneath our feet. We should talk, but after our last conversation I’m not anxious to hear anymore of Cade’s thoughts.
I have too much time to think and his words echo in my head. You’d be like Christa, risking your survival. I know why he said it, but it stings all the same. We have become each other’s family in the absence of the family we were born into. I’ve already lost my mother and three sisters. To lose Christa as well, it’s more than I can swallow. How much can a person grieve before there’s nothing left?
My mind drifts back to one year after the crash. There was a nervous hum around camp as everyone waited for Anita to show the first signs of labor. Weeks before it happened Eli’s partner Lynn pulled me aside and instructed me that when the time came I was to make sure there was water in camp to clean the baby and a sharp and sterile knife for the umbilical cord.
It didn’t seem like enough and I peppered her with questions. What if this and what if that? She didn’t have answers to those questions and she tried to smile them away like everything would be fine. The worry lines around her eyes and across her forehead told me that she was afraid just like me.
Anita was twenty-three years old when we crashed. Her trip to Australia was supposed to be a graduation present. She used to joke that her parents must have been serious when they said she couldn’t move back home after the trip.
I liked her because she treated me like a grown up when I felt like I was skirting the border between being a woman and a child and because she knew how I felt about Cade, even then.
I asked her once, how she knew when it was the right time to tell her partner that she saw him as more than the others. She said it was harder not to tell him.
It was different for her and Ky though. Ky was wild and fun. If he didn’t agree with something the group voted on, he would argue, and try to rally the votes to his side. It never worked, but he never stopped believing it would. Maybe if Cade was bold like that, if his thoughts were always projected and not held so close to his chest, I wouldn’t be so afraid to ask him how he really felt.
When the baby finally came I woke to a shriek and scrambled out of bed. Anita and Ky slept on the other side of camp, but her voice carried and we had all been sleeping lightly anyway. It was as if our bodies had decided to stay at the ready so that when she needed us we would be there. Christa was slower to catch on. She and Tanner stood with their arms crossed shivering with bare arms while Lynn and I worked to get everything ready, just as we had practiced.
I ran down to the water to fill a jug, sloshing into the creek in my bare feet and the pants I had slept in. I didn’t think to roll them up and heading back toward camp I felt like every droplet that clung to me was an extra pound weighing me down and making it harder to get to Anita.
Lynn read the concern on my face and tried to calm me down by reminding me that birth could take a very long time. I vaguely remembered waiting in the hospital for my sister to be born. Then it had been a slow progression, my father pacing the halls, trying to keep us distracted with games of Go Fish and vending machine snacks, but Anita wasn’t like my mother. She wasn’t surrounded by a team of nurses
Ky stood by her side, his eyes wide with terror as she bent forward clutching her abdomen.
“You have to breathe,” reminded Lynn, but Anita’s cheeks were swollen and red as she fought against the pain.
You always hear how a woman will feel an urge to push, but Anita looked as if she was trying to hold the baby in, not get it out. She clasped one arm around her abdomen while the other beat the ground with a closed fist. I wanted to help, but she was looking at me so frightened and so angry that I couldn’t think of anything to say or do that would make a difference.
Not that it mattered because within seconds she was fighting off another contraction.
“They’re so close together,” Lynn whispered, and I watched as Ky shot a look at Lynn over Anita’s body that would have withered a giant.
He placed a hand at the base of Anita’s back and let out an angry breath as the first heavy drops of rain began to fall from the inky black sky. Of course it would rain.
By the time the sun began to rise over the creek the rest of our group had grown uneasy. They wanted to help, and they didn’t want to intrude. No one knew what to do, but I stayed with Anita, Ky, and Lynn anyway. If something happened and I wasn’t there when they needed me, I would forever feel guilty.
For a long time Anita had been someone I looked up to. I wanted to be able to offer her something in return. Even if it was just to witness her pain without running from the uncomfortable warning that sat in my stomach.
As the hours drew on the color drained from Anita’s cheeks. She no longer looked flush and angry and instead began to appear pale and tired. Blood poured from between her legs despite Lynn’s attempts to quickly wipe it away. The cloth we intended to wrap the baby in was scarlet red. Everything was red. Lynn’s hands, Anita’s skirt, the blood kept coming, but the baby still hadn’t crowned.
I couldn’t look at Ky. The helplessness I felt was only a fraction of what he must have been feeling. Sometime in the early morning, he sent Lynn and I away. I leaned down and pressed my lips to Anita’s forehead. She could barely keep her eyes open and I doubt she knew who she was saying goodbye to, but the moment is sealed in my brain.
We were only a year into our time in the wild and already we had grown over confident. How could we have thought having a baby would be easy? Why hadn’t we been better prepared ourselves? And what did that even mean? I’d thought about Anita a handful of times over the years. The truth was I was pretty sure nothing we could have done would have changed the outcome. There was only one thing that could have prevented Anita from dying, and that was not getting pregnant in the first place.